💔 The Breakup Files: Why Clarins and Avon switched to Insider

For beauty shoppers, this expectation doesn’t stop at just the products; they want the entire shopping experience to emulate this personalized approach. Research suggests that 75% of shoppers would pay more for beauty and skincare products if they received a personalized online shopping experience.

Beauty brands need to ensure each online experience is as unique as the customer. This requires a platform that can combine a ton of customer data and then leverage the power of automation and AI to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale and in real time. 

And if your current martech stack can’t support you in delivering that? Well, then it’s time to switch. Something beauty powerhouses Avon and Clarins knew all too well…

It’s not me—it’s you

Like many brands worldwide, these two leading beauty players had hit a wall with their current martech stacks.

For Clarins, the issue was scalability. Fuelled by phenomenal growth across its ecommerce properties, Clarins had quickly outgrown its existing tech stack. A portfolio of single-point solutions meant that valuable customer data was hidden in siloes. It wasn’t able to be leveraged across the entire customer lifecycle to deliver the personalized experiences customers had come to expect.

Elsewhere, Avon was struggling with slow internal processes. These delay-heavy processes meant that launching on-site marketing campaigns took days, if not weeks—and they needed to rely on IT for support. The marketing team couldn’t be as flexible as they needed to be and it was damaging results. What’s more, irrelevant and generic product recommendations were causing users to bounce without purchasing. 

Time to break up?

Both Clarins and Avon knew something needed to change. They knew building seamless customer experiences started with a better understanding of their customers—what makes them tick? What are their pain points? What do they want? And they couldn’t get this clearer understanding with their customer data stuck all over the place in single-point solutions for social, email, CRM, and more. 

To overcome these challenges, it was time to switch to Insider’s enterprise omnichannel marketing solution.

The power to make it personal

Insider’s CDP integrated easily with each brand’s existing tech stack to make sure they could track every customer action and finally wave goodbye to disconnected events and data silos. 👋
Insider helped Avon and Clarins build complete customer profiles by unifying all zero, first, and third-party data into a single interface. This helped both brands gain access to a 360-degree view of their customers.

These enriched customer profiles meant Avon and Clarins could better understand their customer’s behavior and intent, which was the first step towards being able to serve their audiences with personalized content based on predicted likelihood to purchase, customer lifecycle stage, lifetime value, past purchase behavior, items added to the wishlist, and more.

Deepening personalization based on shopper identity

First up, the marketing team at Avon wanted to create more engaging shopping experiences by showing personalized recommendations to improve product discovery—something they could now do thanks to Insider’s CDP.

Using Smart Recommender, Insider’s AI-powered recommendation engine, Avon built a recommendation campaign that targeted users about to exit the website. By showing them recommendations for products closely linked to their previous browsing history and intent, Avon could keep visitors on the site for longer and increase the likelihood of purchase. 

Taking this recommendation strategy one step further, Avon then created FOMO by highlighting the most in-demand products on the homepage to encourage more users to purchase the trending products.

Before consolidating customer data with Insider, there was no way for Avon to know which products were trending in real time. However, with all interactions tracked and made actionable with Insider’s CDP, Avon could launch a homepage banner highlighting the most searched-for and popular products across the site at any time.

This ability to engage customers with tailored messaging and experiences across the customer journey drastically improved Avon’s impact, and the ease of use of Insider’s platform made it quick to launch, too. “The homepage banner took less than half an hour to set up, and yet the results have been incredible,” says Avon’s Senior Ecommerce Specialist. “We were able to generate an increase of 78% in conversions through the strategic placement and messaging of this banner alone.” 

Gamifying experiences to increase leads

At Clarins, the marketing team turned to Insider’s suite of powerful web tools to help scale its email database.

The team first leveraged Insider’s gamified Wheel of Fortune template to create “The Beauty Wheel” to inject excitement and urgency into their lead capture strategy. The Beauty Wheel offered customers a chance to spin the wheel and “choose your own” incentive in return for submitting their email address.

The spin-to-win beauty wheel helped generate a 45% increase in leads, adding more than 8,500 new customers to Clarins’ email database. In addition, more than 4,000 people used the coupon code to purchase products online.

Then, like Avon, Clarins supercharged its recommendation strategy with AI-powered product recommendations. Clarins increased ecommerce sales by personalizing product recommendations based on trending products, recently viewed items, location-based bestsellers, items purchased together, and custom criteria. 

Spin-to-win wheel combined with smart recommendations helped Clarins achieve 30X ROI in just 12 weeks.

The Insider effect

Insider’s platform hugely impacted productivity and profitability at both Avon and Clarins. “We no longer have to wait ages for our internal dev team to catch up,” says Avon’s Digital Optimization and Content Lead for Ecommerce. “We can launch new campaigns in hours instead of weeks, which has drastically minimized our internal efforts and has freed up our dev team to focus on other projects.” 

“Every day, we’re able to increase our efficiency and the results have been amazing. A 78% increase in conversions from one Insider feature reminds us why we’re so glad we chose Insider.” — Digital and Content Lead (Ecommerce) at Avon

The same is also true for Clarins. “I would absolutely recommend Insider,” says Clarins Ecommerce Content Manager. “They are a great partner to work with. We work in a very agile environment, and they are super responsive, always next to us with anything we need, especially in peak times where we need quick solutions.”

And it’s not just Clarins and Avon who trust Insider—1,200 brands use our platform to build seamless, omnichannel customer experiences at scale—including Aesop, MAC, Estee Lauder, Yves Rocher, and L’Oréal. 

“At MAC, we are constantly looking to innovate with new trends and features to make a consumer’s shopping journey memorable! Through Insider we have been able to further strengthen gamification and through the exciting ideas deployed on our website, we aim to be seen as a forward-looking brand with a long-term desirability to purchase.” — Karen Thompson, Brand Head at MAC Cosmetics. Read the case study.

“We’ve managed to achieve a complete overhaul of our on-site engagement strategy, and our personalization methods are more fluid now than ever before. Insider’s platform is complete with all the tools you would require to harness all of our user data, and their AI-powered user segmentation makes it possible to engage each user with contextual recommendations.” — Krzysztof Bylinowski, Digital Manager at Yves Rocher. Read the case study.

The future of beauty ecommerce

With global ecommerce sales in the health and beauty category predicted to reach $447 billion by 2027, how can beauty brands make sure they’re front of mind for customers

and claim their market share?

Success is all about driving better online shopping experiences that are perfectly tailored to whoever is browsing your site. This means leveraging real-time customer data is the secret weapon for success, and the more personalized you can be, the better.

However, this level of hyper-personalization isn’t possible without the right tools to support you. Beauty brands need an actionable, intuitive marketing platform that enables them to deliver seamless experiences at scale—and on autopilot. 

And if your current martech can’t help you achieve that, it’s time to break up and switch to Insider. 

Keep reading

You can find out more about how Insider supports beauty brands like yours by downloading The ultimate digital growth guide for beauty and cosmetics marketers. We share tips, tactics, and real-life examples from all your favorite beauty brands—including MAC Cosmetics, Yves Rocher, Clarins, Avon, and Sephora—on how to drive more growth and revenue.